Brazil Set to Flood Rainforest, Displace Thousands
Luckily, under Brazil’s Constitution Indians must be heard if government changes will affect their land, which gives them veto power over the Belo Monte. Of course, who needs veto power when you have a machete?
Indigenous natives from many tribes attacked an engineer during a protest in Altamira last May, leaving him shirtless and with a bloody gash in his shoulder. After the bloody executive was led away, the protesters danced in celebration, waving their machetes.
“It was a shocking and regrettable act,” said Glenn Switkes, the Brazil-based representative of International Rivers, a California-based nonprofit group. “But it defines what’s at stake and shows that the determination and resistance by indigenous people is likely to be strong.”
The World Wildlife Fund-Brazil says that government officials could meet the growing needs of country by upgrading current systems. In one study they reported that Brazil loses 16-percent of the power it generates, compared with an international rate of about 6-percent. Rapid development of wind, solar and biomass facilities could also reduce the need for building s.
Belo Monte would be built in the heart of Para, a state that’s home to an explosive mix of poor settlers, cattle ranchers, loggers and scammers who fake land titles. And of course business and political leaders in Altamira support Belo Monte because of the development it will bring.
“With the dam, we’d have more income to improve infrastructure,” said Altamira’s mayor, Odileida Sampaio.
The dam would cost $10 billion and wouldn’t open until 2014 at the earliest. Jose Antonio Muniz, the president of gigantic state power company Eletrobras, said he expected to win approval to let construction bids in October and begin work on Belo Monte next year.
“It’s the best site in the world for a dam,” he said during an hourlong interview. “It will produce a lot of energy and have a minimal impact on people and the environment.”
Eletrobras submitted its environmental impact statement on Feb. 27 to Brazil’s environmental agency. It has yet to be made public.
Muniz said the government would minimize the environmental impact and the impact on its indigenous people. He also promised to compensate those affected, even those without land titles.
I don’t know about you, but my money’s on the guys with the machetes!
Source: PhysOrg.org
Image credit: fishbone1 via Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.
My wife is a Brazilian National and I have been there many times. Such a beautiful place!
RT
http://www.privacy.pro.tc
How does this guy even dare to think that 200 square miles of flooding and the displacement of thousands of people is “minimal impact on people and the environment.”.
What an ass. This is awful news.
After most countries destroyed their own forests they´re trying to policy what Brazil does or don´t do with his own.
The world wants Brazil to keep it´s forests for their own reasons? then Brazil should create a worldwide tax to profit from it. It´s all good to destroy everything and everyone, as long as it is you doing it for yourself.
This is wrong. Energy dams of the magnitude described are too
damaging to this sensitive rainforest, so vital to the world’s health. Please, energy planners, have a healing of your hard stone jagged hearts and find a clean, helpful, non-damaging way to provide energy.
This dam will provide a large amount of clean renewable energy, enough to displace several coal fired power plants. The Author of this article does not even mention this. For all we know the renewable energy it produces will more than make up for the displaced trees. This article is very poorly written. The author seems to believe that the worlds problems are best solved by waving around machetes and using violence. That brand of thinking does little to help the world situation.
“I don’t know about you, but my money’s on the guys with the machetes!” - this is journalism at its best, right? Such balanced view of the world.
The point here is: eventually everybody needs energy, so we must build power stations. Sure we have to protect nature, but it has to be a balance of what is needed in both fronts. You should be asking instead: is it better to stop this project (eventually it will be a true necessity) or to stop, i dont know, eating beef (so we dont encourage deforestation), overtaxing poor countries resources with bad habits like buying the ultimate gadget, etc. There are environment studies before practices like this in Brazil, and 19000 people are not too many people for that region (no, its not, im sorry), nor it is a big offset of carbon for the world. Be pragmatic. Brazil is taking huge steps to preserve nature, but it takes time (and it needs to develop economically to increase its capacity to preserve - a strange conundrum, sure).
For the next two decades a good part of the forest will go, sure (and thats bad, of course), but there are huge forces working towards preservation of the Amazon nowadays. We need pressure to keep the process, but tone down the ignorance. This is not another indonesia.
eu sou do brasil
what to do?
For Hydro Electric Power - Yes, go ahead, and make the back-waters into the biggest fishery the world has ever seen! Move the indigenous people, treat them as equals, humans, a natural resource, as we know you will! Develop wind power from the breezes on the back water, build new villages around, and teach the folks there to fish!, Give them lights, and education, so they can make even better use of the land. Do not allow the sick vulture capitalists of the U.S.A. create an “annual car model change” situation for the sake of ever-increasing profits, sending 100 years worth of natural resources to the scrap-yards in the name of amusement and high profits, this is not a good model to follow, but most of all, do not take criticism from this bunch of rabble, who for the same 100 years or more have raped the natural resources of the world and left nothing but a crumbling Detroit City behind to show for their efforts! Move forward into a better future for all, not “up and down”, for the enrichment ofa very few, as the Americans have done! Do better, arrive with something to show for your efforts every day, year after year, and remember, the critics are the creators of the biggest “Third World” environmentally torn slum ever, the U.S.A. Avoid their Capitalist follies and serve all your people equally! You will be O.K. if you stay environmentally friendly and honest. Cuba has proven value in human dignity when poverty reigns, and the value of each individual as a brother or sister. You have natural resources , exploit them in the most sustainable way, waste nothing, and cheat no-one, and the resource will return happy survival for all and a great nation to live in!
The Xingu river is one of the most species-rich in the world. It’s home to about as many unique species of fish as are found on the entire continent of Europe. Most of them will become rare or extinguished by this dam.
This dam is the first part of a gigantic plan to clear-cut 1/3rd of the amazon and turn it into soy bean plantations. A series of other, and much bigger, dams are to be built after this one. Their purpose is not to produce electricity, but to provide shipping-lanes for the lumber and soy beans. This plan it president Lula’s “legacy”, he wants to “modernize” the “backwards” amazon, and it’s already decided upon and it’s already got funding.
Western environmental organizations have completely ignored this because they are myopically focussing on global warming right now, and the Brazilian government shrewdly played to that. Several local people who’ve opposed these plans have been killed.
Huge dams are not a clean form of energy. They destroy ecosystems and displace local people. They are threatening most of the worlds great river systems from China’s plans for the Mekong and the Turks plans at Ilisu which will affect the ecosystems of the Tigris and the Iraqi marshes.
The Amazon ecosystem is already under severe strain through continuing deforestation. The author rightly points out that this latest escapade is likely to become a white elephant as the Amazon dries out and Brazil succeeds in turning itself into the Sahara Desert of South America.